Friendship in the Mirror
“In the early 1990’s, neurologists researching monkeys accidentally identified what they came to call mirror neurons, whose function is to fire when we need to replicate the behavior or actions of another person. When we see a person laugh or cry, we cannot help but mirror that emotional feeling; we all know how the mood of a group can be dominated by a single person in high spirits or emotional distress. We constantly use our mirror neurons to correlate our behavior with other people’s: they are the fundamental basis of empathy.
There is a therefore a literal basis for the description of two close friends as being in sync. The two “soul mates” are actually two brains whose mirror neurons are oscillating at the same speed. A kind of “odd sympathy” occurs between the friends, similar to the unexpected synchronization the seventeenth-century scientist Huygens observed between two pendulum clocks in his home. And over time, the intertwined personage merge into a single entity. A serving of such emotional connections, therefore, can never be total. Instead, it leaves behind a traumatic void akin tot he phantom limb phenomena, where a missing body part continues to cause pain in the patient long after the injury. Could mirrors be used not just to mitigate the pain of phantom limbs but also alleviate the sorrow over lost friends or lovers who continue to haunt us? Have their faces been permanently etched into our brain? Or would it be possible to aim our hundred billion mirror neurons at the painful memory and use them, like the mirror array of Archimedes’ fabled heat ray, to burn it away? Ramachandran’s mirrors may not provide a solution, but the realm of magic offers one potential alternative. Instructions to follow. ” Mats Bigert, Cabinet, issue 36, winter 2009-2010 / Friendship
